“I wanted a sonic recreation of my all-time favorite analog board, and I believe we got it. The past is not dead; it’s here now!”

Bill Szymczyk
Grammy Award Winning & Multi Platinum Engineer / Producer
Credits: B.B. King, Eagles, The James Gang, Joe Walsh, The J. Geils Band, Bob Seger, The Who, Santana, and many, many more

MBSI is a faithful model of the channel strip from the Criteria Studio C Custom MCI console. It features a mic/line section, a dynamics section, an EQ section and a fader as well as an accurate model of the stereo bus output of the console.

The original console was ruthlessly analog with a wonderful box tone imprinted just by running through the channel, and, like many devices of its time, was quirky and awesome. You will find (just like we did) that the markings on the face plate do not match the actual behavior of the processor.

The EQ module is especially sweet. It featured a simple design with limited components, utilizing the inherent characteristics of the components to achieve equalization. This means that all the controls interact, and that things like the Q of the filters change with gain and frequency.

This may seem (especially in modern times) to be a defect or challenge in use, but just like the console, MBSI pushes you into making good decisions based on what you are hearing and its limited yet musical range of options.

The dynamics section of the original console was a Suppressor meant to be used with analog tape, which is not that useful in a modern production context. The controls of the console were stepped. The mid-band of the EQ section was limited to boost only, and the filter section only supported low or high cut. In other words, the console was limited by the technology and design of the time.

In our discussions with Bill and based upon feedback from our beta testers, we determined that while we want to have a faithful reproduction of the original console’s channel strip (“Classic” Mode), it would be great to have a mode that reflected a more modern workflow and represented the mods we would do to the console if we were updating it, so we added a “Modern” mode.

In Modern Mode, MBSI swaps in a channel compressor that reflects the types of external compression that Bill used with the console, and makes it so that the controls operate continuously (while still maintaining the ability to snap to the original stepped control values). We also added mods to allow you to do cuts with the mid-band, and enable both the high cut and low cut filters at the same time.

MBSI captures the sound of the Seventies - and now you can too!

The +DSP version of this plugin running with zero latency on hardware is included all Metric Halo 3d Audio Interfaces.